The public record of a contract to the Israeli company which handled archiving Signal chats for the DoD was done during Biden admin. And it's been well reported if you just Google it:

> Alexa Henning, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, tweeted last week that “widespread use” of Signal began under the Biden administration, adding that “at ODNI, when I got my phone, it was pre-installed.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/02/inside-the-hazy-fra...

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apical_dendrite 21 hours ago | parent [-]

You're missing some key distinctions. The issues are: 1) putting classified information into a non-classified system; 2) putting information that needs to be preserved under laws like the presidential records act into systems where it's set to be auto-deleted. Both are illegal. Simply saying that the Biden administration pre-installed Signal is irrelevant. There are legitimate uses.

Your own article makes this exact point: > Matthew Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who left the agency in 2021, said that while Signal was used during his time in government, “it was almost exclusively restricted to scheduling purposes,” such as letting their boss know that they’ll be late to work because of personal circumstances. “That’s why Signalgate is all the more staggering — because these senior leaders were doing the exact opposite of what even my most junior intelligence officers knew not to do,” he said.

You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".

This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation and as a result creating a situation where it's possible to accidentally add the wrong contact and therefore exposing that information to a journalist.

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dmix 14 hours ago | parent [-]

> This has nothing to do with adding the wrong contacts. It has to do with putting highly-sensitive material into Signal to circumvent the law around records preservation

My comment above already mentions public records of the DoD contracting out archiving of the Signal chat, so it doesn't in fact circumvent laws around preservation.

> You're doing bullshit partisan whataboutism. "well the democrats did it first".

I don't think it's a huge sin for government workers to be using Signal, remote work and messaging is the new norm and they will use something whether we like it or not, and Signal is the least bad option. I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all, as I'm skeptical they'd build something better internally - and to your hyperpolitical points I don't see large distinctions between these type of tech choices between administrations (the DoD staff largely remains the same even when presidents change).

The issue with encryption and security will always be human security practices come first-and-foremost, technology second. They failed an OPSEC checklist when using group chats and need to implement better identification management. That's the sort of lesson that large organizations frequently need to re-learn the hard way when adopting new (and often better) things.

This was just a good lesson in security hygiene

	▲	fc417fc802 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not clear on the verdict here. 1. Classified information. Was it legal to put that into the DoD approved Signal build? The media coverage at the time gave me the impression that it was not. 2. Records keeping. Were the Trump admin chats in question properly archived then? I had been led to believe that they weren't. Do you believe that to be incorrect? > I don't blame the Biden DoD for experimenting down that road at all The person you're replying to never criticized them for such.